The present invention relates to integrated circuit design, and more specifically, to dynamic voltage frequency scaling.
Integrated circuits or chips are increasingly used in a number of applications such as consumer electronics, computing devices, and communication systems. While higher speed operation of chips is desirable, the increased speed (chip frequency) comes at the cost of higher power consumption. To balance performance and power usage, integrated circuits may include adaptive voltage regulators that facilitate changing the voltage during operation of the chip to achieve a certain operational frequency. Thus, for example, voltage may be increased when higher performance is needed and voltage may be decreased when low power consumption is desired. In order to adjust the voltage as needed, the relationship between voltage and frequency must be understood.